West Midlands Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

International News

April 2017

The White House’s budget blueprint seeks to revive spending for a hotly contested facility in Nevada that would store the nation’s nuclear waste. President Donald Trump is asking Congress to approve $120 million in spending to restart licensing activity at the Yucca Mountain repository and fund an interim storage program. That would allow development at the remote site located about 100 miles from Las Vegas to start up again. Most Nevadans oppose the plan, which would consolidate the U.S. nuclear waste load currently spread across the country in their state. The project has essentially been on ice since 2010, when then-President Barack Obama suspended licensing for the Yucca Mountain facility.

It is estimated that North Korea now has 10 nuclear weapons, up from six or eight in 2013. This increase is in contrast to an overall decrease in the number of nuclear weapons worldwide. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) an independent resource on global security, has estimated that the number has fallen by almost a third, from 22,600 in 2010 to around 15,395 last year. That said, SIPRI also states that both the US and Russia are going through extensive modernising programmes for their remaining weapons.

Scientists are testing how 20 million people would react to a nuclear attack in New York City. Experts at the Center for Social Complexity in Virginia have been awarded a $450,000 (£363,000) grant to study the aftermath of a blast in the Big Apple. The money is being used to develop a computer model to simulate how up to 20 million people or “agents” would respond in the first 30 days after the bomb.